January 18, 2011

Spring Semester Equals…Snow?

As I write this, snowflakes the size of golf balls are falling on Boston. 3,012 miles away (but who’s counting?) at home in Los Angeles, my sister is enjoying 81-degree weather. While I’m a bit jealous of her January beach weather, I have to admit that the snow is pretty cool. In fact, I’ve added “lived in a real, live, snow globe” to my list of Boston accomplishments. I’m also proud to announce that I successfully accomplished my first car-digging-out over the weekend. (Sort of…with help…and it wasn’t that snowed in. But us Southern California kids have to start somewhere.)

In other news, school has started! And as of Thursday, I’ll have two classes under my belt thanks to BU’s week-long intensive classes. Last week was five days of Clean Energy Services during which I worked on a project with a solar services start-up looking to take their business overseas. Each team member researched solar energy and incentives in different countries to determine the feasibility of investing there. I chose to look at Kenya and learned a lot—not just about formal solar energy policies, but also about all of the cool guerilla home solar systems that people build off-grid.

This week brings five days of Negotiations, one of the most popular classes here at the School of Management. After three days, I can tell you that while I’ve overcome some of my negotiation fears, I’ll still happily pay someone to do it for me. Definitely not one of my core competencies.

The rest of the semester will bring Financial Statement Analysis (another must-take at BU), Public Policy Analysis, and Modeling in Excel. Of course this is in addition to putting the job search into full-swing, staying involved in various groups at school, and putting in quality time with friends at the local pub before we all fan out across the country—maybe across the world—after graduation in May. If the past three semesters are any indication, it will be over before we know it!